Dave Winer, a well known blogger, asked his Twitter ecosystem (people who subscribe to his updates) if they knew something about a possible explosion in Falls Church, Virginia. Soon other people on Twitter told what they had seen or felt in and around that area.

It was 90 minutes later when official media reported what actually happened - thereby confirming what several people reported already through Twitter.

Of course it helped that Dave has such a huge following on Twitter (more than 9000 people) but this is again a case of social media being faster than traditional media.

I have used microblogging for conferences and regular updates myself and while at first I didn't really see a use for Twitter or Jaiku I now see more and more practical business cases popping up.

Here's a good overview on how journalists can and are using microblogging tools. For corporations I can think of applying the principles to internal communications, urgent situation updates, crisis communications and more.

What do you think ? Still the biggest waste of time ever...?

We're now able to:

• Track brand & product mentions online.
• Discover positive or negative trends around a brand.
• Monitor the blogopshere and news sites for potential issues.
• Create industry intelligence reports.
• Draft online competitive analysis reports.

This is a very important add on to our existing services. Listening is the first step for any company who would like to start using social media for its business communications efforts, our dashboard will allow us to do exactly that.

The online monitoring dashboard from Attentio can be seen as the professional/top level extension to our RSS workshops and in house training sessions as well as an extension to Leads United traditional clipping service. I am looking forward to tailor this service to specific clients and to research my first trend report about social media in Europe...

Of course, if you're interested to discover this new service, please let me know.

Mainstream media have turned to the web some time ago but more and more news sites are incorporating social media features like RSS feeds, blogs etc... into their websites.

Already in 2006, the Bivings Group started to index this movement when it launched a call for "newspaper research" which I eagerly answered at the time and started to create my own index of Belgian news sites... which I never finished.

Today this topic is active again thanks to the efforts of Joanna Geary in the UK who, on her turn, was heard by the good people from L'Observatoire Des Medias who are now trying to index as much as media websites as possible in Europe.

This time I'll try to get my 20 something colleagues from Leads United to split up the Belgian online news ecosystem so that we can all add at least 1 site to the index... Should work and not take that much time I guess.

The launch of the new website of cafebabel.com today is showing the way...

Here's a short extract from their press release:

Cafebabel.com in figures:

• 300, 000 unique visitors per month (source: Google Analytics)
• 6 languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish
• 350 journalists and 700 translators in 26 local editing teams in Europe
• 70 European blogs
• 4, 000 subscribers to the community
• 11 full time employees and 3 interns
• Created in 2001 by Erasmus students, cafebabel.com is an independent media edited by the Babel International association.

Very interesting discussions here and a high level of communications executives from across Europe. I'll blog more about the conference but you can follow the live stream today and tomorrow if you can't be here.

I also have a small Twitter stream you can follow. If by any chance you are also Twittering this one, please use #EACD as a tag. Thanks.